He wants to start with a Lower Manhattan marker to Henri Philippe Petain, a French military and political hero who much later became an odious Nazi collaborator.

Yet the marker merely notes the fact that the city held a ticker-tape parade in his honor in 1931 — fully a decade before his collaboration. Is the memory of that parade to be struck from the history books, too?

see also

The Hall of Fame, created by NYU, was once America’s great national pantheon, one of the country’s most famous sites. Membership in the Hall was deemed the highest possible honor.

And the inclusion of Lee and Jackson was intended to help heal the still-festering wounds of the Civil War and Reconstruction — which is why their busts were specifically placed together with those of the North’s Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and Adm. David Farragut.

Not to be ignored, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker introduced a bill to get rid of a dozen statues of Confederate figures from the US Capitol. Nancy Pelosi — who did nothing to remove them when she was speaker — is also on board.

see also

All this is starting to look like a Stalinist purge of history. That it’s being done in a mad rush, with emotions and recriminations running wild, makes it all the worse.

Here’s a real danger: If communities insist on removing these historical symbols, the least they can do is make sure they are preserved and safeguarded in museums. Yet the tear-them-down rampage puts that guarantee at risk.

And be warned: The mob rage will not be sated even when all Confederate symbols are gone.

History is complicated, and so are its many key figures. They need to be remembered, studied and, most important, discussed — not erased.